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Teenager Creates Twitter Infecting Virus

A fresh virus has seemingly infected Twitter, the micro-blogging utility on April 11, 2009, as per the reports published by CNET on April 11, 2009.

Michael "Mikeyy" Mooney, aged 17 years, who designed the Twitter-copycat website StalkDaily, has confessed that he created the worms. Mooney stated that he knew about the attack, in fact he was responsible for it. According to him, he launched it to provide the developers with an understanding of the problem as well as to try and promote his own name and website. Computerworld published this on April 12, 2009.

Dubbed "StalkDaily," the virus exploited an XSS flaw affecting Twitter to infect the profiles of various users. The first assault depended on tweets, referring to many malicious accounts while users accessed the profiles of those accounts. Consequently, the users' own profiles became corrupted while their twitter accounts subsequently circulate more spamming e-mails to their buddies to lure them to view the contaminated profiles.

Reportedly, the original attack compromised 90 accounts, followed with the second attack that compromised 100 accounts. Soon after, the third one followed that started on April 12, 2009.

Meanwhile, Mooney was also behind the April 12 virus that was named as "Mikeyy" since the tweets the malware thrust contaminated accounts that spammed messages like "Man, Twitter can't fix sh*t. Mikeyy owns" and "Mikeyy I am done..."

Furthermore, with the StalkDaily.com initiating a huge total of malicious assaults, Twitter cautioned people to avoid accessing the site.

However, on April 12, 2009, Twitter informed its members that if the StalkDaily issue affected their accounts, they needed to set new passwords. Twitter on its part, too, might have devised new passwords for its users.

Meanwhile F-Secure Corp. the security firm alerted that the assaults might still be going on. Chief Research Officer at F-Secure, Mikko Hypponen, predicted that there may be a number of modified Twitter viruses for a couple of days. Computerworld reported this.

Hypponen cautioned users to use Twitter carefully, not to view profiles, and to avoid clicking links. He also pointed out that since the assaults use JavaScript, users might protect themselves by rendering the JavaScript disabled it their respective browsers.